


strangers that say i know you

by eggosandxmen



Series: season seven theories [2]
Category: Mabel (Podcast)
Genre: Anna and Janet’s Excellent Adventure (to go get their girlfriends), Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Jonathan “Tired Dad Friend” MabelPodcast Does His Best, WHOLE CAST FOR THIS ONE BABYYYY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:49:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27655735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggosandxmen/pseuds/eggosandxmen
Summary: it’s cyclical, just like everything else.Or, a return to school for Mabel and Ekaterina, and a return to King’s County for Anna.
Relationships: Anna Limon & Mabel Martin & Veratrine (Mabel), Anna Limon/Mabel Martin, Janet Kirk & Anna Limon
Series: season seven theories [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2008822
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	1. anna&janet

**Author's Note:**

> title from david by noah gundersen.
> 
> not me starting another multi chapter mabel fanfiction

“Janet,” Anna says, and Janet’s sure her name has never meant so much in anyone else’s mouth, “I need you to get me out of here.”

“My truck’s parked in the front,” Janet finds herself responding, and helps her up without thinking. “The cops won’t show for a bit. Come’on.”

The two of them shuffle down to Janet’s car, Janet slamming the door to the driver’s side shut and speeding off just as the first sirens wail in the distance.

Anna all but crumples against the window, barely able to keep her head up, and Janet glances at her.

“Are you sure we can’t go to the hospital?” 

Anna groans, sitting up just barely. “No. Not safe. I need to find that Jonathan guy… I need— Mabel, she—“

“Mabel Martin?” Janet asks. “Didn’t she disappear a long time ago?”

Anna’s face drops into confusion and then goes close to tears, and Janet hurried to restate herself. “I mean— I’m sure Mabel’s fine. When we get back to my place we can call her.”

“She doesn’t pick up her phone,” Anna says, miserable, and Janet doesn’t respond, focusing on the road.

They get back to HQ (Janet’s affectionate nickname for the little apartment she rents) about twenty minutes later, Janet helping Anna into the elevator and managing to get them both through the door in one piece. She gets Anna a piece of pizza and the phone before going to her room, peeling off her paint-covered sweat-soaked thorn-riddled shirt, and replacing it with one of her old merch t-shirts. 

When she goes back downstairs, Anna’s on the phone, listening with all the color drained out of her face.

“You motherfucker,” she says, and whoever’s on the other end laughs loud enough for Janet to hear. The sound makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

“No. No, you— let her go, give her back—“

The hang-up tone rings out and Anna drops the phone, staring blankly ahead of her.

And, damn, Janet’s nosy.

“What happened? Was that Mabel?”

“No, that was not Mabel,” Anna says, her voice breaking. “That was the woman that took her.”

“There’s a story here, right?”

Anna nods and Janet sets her jaw. 

“Okay. I’m going to get snacks and blankets. I’ll be right back.”


	2. jonathan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the other side of the phone call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my overwhelming attachment to jonathan is really obvious here please just let me live i love him so much

Mabel Martin’s flip phone is kept in a pile with the other various things on Jonathan’s desk— 6163’s scribbled ramblings, the double’s bracelet. When it rings, before he can even go to turn it off, Miss Silver picks it up and answers.

“Mabel?” he hears the other voice say, relieved and terrified all at once. “Oh, god, I was so worried—“

“I think you might have the wrong number,” Miss Silver says, half a smile playing at her lips, and Jonathan stares down at the code he’s currently hacking so he doesn’t have to listen to her torture someone else, even over the phone.

“You motherfucker,” the other woman— that must be Anna, his brain supplies— “— let her go, give her back—“

Miss Silver hangs up.

“Jonathan?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I need you to track where that signal was coming from.”

“On it,” he says, fighting down a sigh.

Another day at the office, he supposes, as she walks out and he finally lets himself breathe.

Next door, 6163 starts screaming. He takes out his earbuds and plays music until his ears start bleeding to drown it out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments are nice if you’re willing thank you!


	3. vera

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the twig gets their say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two notes: vera uses they/them pronouns + there is a mention of them getting dissected in this. nothing graphic, but I mean. they are stuck with aurora silver so. 
> 
> anyway i can’t believe it’s canon that vera AND mabel are non binary thank you mx mabel martin the creator for my LIFE

“My name is Veratrine,” Vera says to the weeds in the corner of the room they’re being kept in. It’s so dark they can’t even tell what type of plant it is, but they suppose that it probably understands them, anyway. “My name is Veratrine. I am ten months old and I am in love with Luna Thorne and Mabel Martin is near this room and Anna is gone—“

At this they cut themself off, like saying it out loud will make it more true somehow. Anna isn’t here, that they know; they haven’t heard her screaming. Mabel’s stopped yelling for Anna, too, so they figure Mabel’s finally realized that she can’t hear her, either. 

Aurora Silver isn’t quite as interested in them as she is in Mabel and Ekaterina, but that doesn’t mean Vera hasn’t been privy to the experiments that take place in this— school? Mabel calls it a school. It feels more like a dungeon. They’d been tied down and dissected once, which was even less fun than it sounds despite the fact that Vera thought Luna made it so they couldn’t feel pain.

They were, quite clearly, wrong about that.

Anyway—

The plants do not respond, so Vera wraps their arms around their stomach and rocks back against the wall, humming a little.

They do not miss Anna or Mabel. That would be ridiculous. But sometimes when they’re particularly upset or hurt, they move to the other wall so they’re at the very least a little closer to Mabel, and sometimes when Mabel is very tired and pacing around their room they’ll talk to Vera, rambling about anything she pleases at the top of her lungs. It makes them feel a bit more real, to hear their name, to know that Mabel misses them just as much as they miss her. Even if they refuse to admit it.


	4. ekaterina

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> soldier, keep on marching on!

Ekaterina Roskova is refusing to give her name up again.

When Aurora Silver had taken them, the three of them, she had scrawled her name on her arm in the pen she’d been using to underline passages in her book in the living room. Mabel and Vera and Anna were all on the floor, Mabel and Anna cuddling and Veratrine trying to tell them something dramatically, when the house had started— screaming. 

Anna had sat up, alarmed, and tried to talk to it, before a bright burst of something had lit the room up and left Mabel falling against the empty air that Anna had formerly held her in.

And then the bullets started ricocheting, of course.

They’d woken up in a van, Vera unconscious, Mabel blindfolded, and Ekaterina gagged but still unable to stop seeing the reality of their situation when Aurora Silver smiled at her from across the truck.

Ekaterina curled in the corner of her seat, shaking harder than she should be, almost forty-five years old (but not really, a voice in the back of her head reminds her— she is still nineteen, really, still just nineteen years old, back here with the woman who— who—)

Well, a panic attack couldn’t hurt.

She shook and shook and shook until Mabel woke up, promptly lighting herself on fire to try to break the cuffs she was in, and even though it didn’t work it still helped to see some fight left in her. Ekaterina balled her hands into fists and bit her cheek until it bled, but she didn’t let herself shake anymore. The little victory counted for something, even now, weeks later, when she’s barely conscious.

Like a soldier, though, she keeps reciting what she needs to remember— her name, the others’ names, where she was born, her first girlfriend’s favorite color. The little things that make her a person. It doesn’t make everything better, but it keeps her safe and keeps her fighting.

Goddamn, she needs to get into therapy when this is done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have so many mabel drabbles to post today let’s goooo


	5. jon&anna&janet&tressa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> last one! this story was fun to do!!

“Jonathan Burke?” the voice on the other end of his recorder asks, glitching and echoing in on itself.

“Who— how the—“

“Jonathan Burke,” the voice says again, “where is Mabel Martin?”

“I don’t— I— Anna Limón?” he says, putting two and two together. “You’re Anna Limón, aren’t you? How’d you get on— on a recorder?”

“I’m the god of a haunted house,” the voice says, almost smug. “I can do a lot of things.”

“What do you want?” Jonathan hisses, grabbing the recorder and shoving it under his coat. “Do you understand how utterly fucked I am if—“

“I don’t care,” she cuts him off flatly. “What are you people doing to Mabel?”

Jon moves the wiretap off his desk with a swift motion, cutting the feeds and finally taking a deep breath.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Except you do, because you just cut the power to the wiretap.”

Jonathan makes a face.

“Where is Mabel Martin?” she says again, just as the woman starts screaming across the hall. Anna makes a noise like someone’s gutted her. “I am going to. Kill. All of you.”

“Have fun with that,” Jonathan says, and the recorder clicks off.

—

“So,” says Janet, wrapped in a blanket and sipping Mountain Dew, “you think they’re coming for us?”

“Probably.” 

“Okay,” she says, shrugging. “Then we go to them first.”

“You’d do that?” Anna asks, and Janet grins.

“We’re friends now. Of course I’d break into a terrifying illegal facility to get your girlfriend with you.”

It takes two days, six Five Below supply-runs, and an interrogation with the Jonathan guy, but they make it.

Case in point: the blood-covered autopsy table with a girl tied to it that Janet is currently attempting to break loose.

“Dammit!” Janet mutters, pulling at the ropes on the girl’s wrists. “This is why I have my multi tool, gimme a second—“

The girl coughs up some more blood and Janet hums sympathetically. 

“Sorry, I’m the cavalry here today. Anna and I split up, I guess she probably found the others, but she was really worried about you.”

One of the ropes finally breaks and the girl starts grabbing at the other one, Janet pushing her hand aside to cut that one off too. “I’m Janet, by the way. You’re Ekaterina?”

“Yes,” the girl says. “Can you help me up?”

Janet swings one of Ekaterina’s arms around her shoulders and starts pulling her down the hallway.

Anna was already on her way, smiling rather deliriously because of the bits missing out of her arm, Mabel holding one of her hands and Veratrine half-slung over Mabel’s shoulders.

Anna all but pushes all of them through the portal eating a hole through the wall, and they all land in a heap on a rug in a small room.

A woman in an Ithaca College sweatshirt stares at them from the room’s singular desk chair in front of a computer setup, blinking once at the portal on her wall before it disappears and then looking down at the lot of them.

“I’m Tressa,” she says. “Been waiting for you guys.”

**Author's Note:**

> i love all the minor characters so much this is a janet kirk and jonathan stan account


End file.
